Friday, February 8, 2013

Old Jarhead's Political SitRep for February 9, 2013

Old Jarhead's Political SitRep for February 9, 2013

Robert A. Hall

I expect to be off line until Sunday evening. ~Bob

Your one-stop-shop for political news and opinion. Please forward to friends who need to be informed. This SitRep (Military for “Situation Report”) is created by many readers who send me items for inclusion, which I would have likely missed or skipped. And I can only spend at most three hours a night pulling stuff, plus the healthcare or economic stuff that crosses my desk at work. As always, I—and you—owe them thanks and appreciation. I post articles because I think they are of interest and will stimulate thought and discussion. Doing so doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree (or disagree) with every—or any—opinion in the posted article, or that I was able to verify the information presented, which is the responsibility of the author. I try not to post things that are false, or too far a stretch, regardless of the view point, but I don’t always succeed. As always on the Net, or in the legacy media, you must read critically and with skepticism.

Excerpt: Adrenalin started to flow and my Marine infantry training kicked in. I sprinted towards the bedroom for a weapon. Instinct was first for the shotgun - 12 gauge Mossberg pump - in hand, shell chambered, and ready within seconds.

Excerpt: But the effort to date has not snared any major dealers or taken down a gang. Instead, it resulted in a string of mistakes and failures, including an ATF military-style machine gun landing on the streets of Milwaukee and the agency having $35,000 in merchandise stolen from its store, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found. When the 10-month operation was shut down after the burglary, agents and Milwaukee police officers who participated in the sting cleared out the store but left behind a sensitive document that listed names, vehicles and phone numbers of undercover agents. (ATF stands for All Time Failures. Yet another case of these clowns putting guns in the hands of bad guys. As the tee shirt says, “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be a convenience store, not a government agency.” In this case, it was again a convenience for thugs. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: Protesters from the organization Code Pink rushed the witness table at the beginning of the hearing as Brennan took his seat before the Senate panel. (Democrats loved Code Pink when they were acting like spoiled children towards Bush and Republicans. How times change. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: A bipartisan quartet of senators, including two National Rifle Association members and two with "F" ratings from the potent firearms lobby, are quietly trying to find a compromise on expanding the requirement for gun-sale background checks. (I don’t have a real problem with background checks. But any deal should include actual prosecution and jail for felons who break the law by trying to buy guns. The current laws are not enforced. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: Question: How many times over the past four years have exploitative liberal journalists and Democratic leaders rushed to pin random acts of violence on the tea party, Republicans, Fox News and conservative talk radio? Answer: Nearly a dozen times, including … Question: What will this rabid Blame Righty mob do now that an alleged triple-murderer has singled out prominent lefties in the media and Hollywood for fawning praise as part of his crazed manifesto advocating cop-killing?

Excerpt: "I asked the driver ... who he was (and) where he was from," the general remembers, "and I slapped the turret gunner around the leg and I said, 'Who are you?' And she leaned down and said, 'I'm Amanda.' "And I said, 'Ah, OK.' So female turret gunner protecting division commander."

Excerpt: After Mr. Obama delivered his second inaugural address week before last, it has been dawning on people that his political strategy is that of the Thunderdome in Mel Gibson's Mad Max 3 movie: "Two men enter, one man leaves." He is totally win/lose, the total antithesis of win/win. From Mau-Mau tautology mixed with Marxist ideals inbred from his absent father and a mother enriched in the heresies of the deep left Communism of Frank Marshall Davis, this man has unfurled his true colors.

I am not so much interested in the hard science, the multi-dimensional plotting (e.g., 'strange attractors' of Chaos Theory), for decoding pattern as I am mere perception and appreciation of and practical application. Experience helps detect pattern. So does instinct.

Excerpt: “IF YOU like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.” That was what Barack Obama promised, time and again, to voters nervous about his plans to shake up America’s health-care system. It was an empty promise, a bit like saying: “If you like your husband, I promise he won’t divorce you.”

Excerpt: The rest of this post you can write yourself, especially if you read yesterday’s item about the egregious double standard between the media’s treatment of Palin after Tucson and the SPLC after the FRC shooting. The left, needless to say, is blameless for Dorner’s actions. Also needless to say, if his manifesto had extolled gun rights and called Obama “a vile and inhumane piece of sh*t” instead of Wayne LaPierre, this would be a five-alarm media inferno floating on a sea of sweaty rhetoric about The Conservative Movement turning to madness over gun control.

Worth reading (Adult Language): How 'The Karate Kid' Ruined The Modern World. By David Wong

Excerpt: We have a vague idea in our head of the "price" of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong. Accomplishing worthwhile things isn't just a little harder than people think; it's 10 or 20 times harder. … America is full of frustrated, broken, baffled people because so many of us think, "If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc).

Excerpt: In the 21st-century workplace, mathematical capability is a key determinant of productivity. College graduates who majored in subjects such as math, engineering, and the physical sciences earn an average of 19 percent more than those who specialized in other fields, according to the American Community Survey of 2009 and 2010. … Between 1972 and 2011, real GDP per capita doubled in the U.S., but the average math SAT score of college-bound high-school seniors and the proportion of college graduates majoring in a mathematically intensive subject barely budged. (why fix a problem when you can just give up? See the next article. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: California will no longer require eighth-graders to take algebra — a move that is line with the Common Core standards being adopted by most states, but that may leave students unprepared for college.

Excerpt: Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has his hands full these days. He’s under both criminal and ethical investigations concerning alleged misuse of public funds, and he was recently the subject of a cover story by Denver’s alternative newspaper, Westword, which portrayed him as a honey badger raiding a beehive.

Excerpt: The Pentagon’s top leaders said Thursday that they favored supplying weapons to rebels locked in a grinding civil war with the Syrian government, a position that put them directly at odds with the White House. … Obama has consistently opposed arming the Syrian resistance, saying that U.S. involvement could backfire. (I tend to agree with Obama on this, unless you can be very sure the groups we were arming were the good guys, and there are few good guys there, Our troops in Afghanistan are being killed with stuff we gave them to kill Soviets, I believe. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: If there’s one term I would like to see retired in 2013, it’s the one so much favored by politicians and other hypocrites: “With all due respect.” Has anyone in the history of the world begun a sentence with those four words that didn’t immediately evolve into the equivalent of calling the other person a charlatan, a thief or an ignoramus?

Muslims killing Muslims for Allah. ~Bob. Excerpt: A series of explosions across Iraq killed at least 26 people Friday, continuing a spate of violence that has marked recent political turmoil and witnessed bombings now on seven consecutive Fridays.

Excerpt: No one claimed responsibility but Islamist militant group Boko Haram, a sect which has condemned the use of Western medicine, has been blamed for carrying out a spate of assaults on security forces in the city in recent weeks. (To call them barbarians is to insult barbarians. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: Yemen has asked the United Nations Security Council to investigate a ship the Yemeni authorities said they had seized with a cargo of Iranian-made missiles, rockets and other weapons, the United Nations envoy to Yemen said Thursday.

Excerpt: The next time a cashier asks "paper or plastic?" think of Abbie Schoenwetter. He spent more than six years in federal confinement for shipping lobster in plastic instead of cardboard. There's no American law against doing so. But thanks to a vague, overly broad, and otherwise unjust federal criminal law, the U.S. government claimed it was upholding a Honduran regulation.

Excerpt: In naming Sally Jewell as Interior secretary, President Obama lauded the REI boss as a woman who "knows the link between conservation and good jobs." Tell that to Kevin Lunny. Mr. Lunny runs an 80-year-old California oyster business that had the bad luck decades ago of being enclosed in a federal park.

Excerpt: Justice Samuel Alito, by mouthing the words “not true” as Obama read these sentences off of the TelePrompTer, delivered, with all due deference, one of the most memorable and public rebuttals of our time. The Citizens United decision to which Obama referred did not actually reverse “a century of law.” The idea that the court had opened a door through which “foreign corporations” and “foreign entities” could influence U.S. elections was false.

Excerpt: The Supreme Court dismissed a retirement community company’s challenge to the legitimacy of the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday evening, delaying the expected high court battle over President Barack Obama’s recess appointments. The NLRB ordered HealthBridge Systems to rehire hundreds of union members in November who had been on strike since July despite a criminal investigation into allegations that some strikers sabotaged the identification documents and medical records of elderly residents, including those suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Excerpt: To the anti-war movement, all conflicts between the free world and the world of slaves are reduced to a pithy formula of moral equivalence. America lifted the sword and has gone on swinging it. It never puts the sword down and therefore it dies by it. Chris Kyle becomes a metaphor for the great beast of war, unleashed by the Rockefellers, the CIA, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve, that goes around swinging the sword until it destroys itself.

Excerpt: Are you one of those people who look askance at foreign aid because you think most of it ends up in the pockets of dictators, warlords, terrorists, and the like, and because even when it does get into the right hands, it tends to encourage dependency and work against economic growth? Well, have I got a book for you. Jonathan Foreman’s Aiding and Abetting makes a strong case that things are even worse than you thought, lots worse.

Excerpt: We didn’t get to this yesterday, but it’s definitely worth watching — especially for the skill shown by Lindsey Graham in his examination of Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey. The headline takeaway will be what is remembered most: the revelation that Barack Obama never bothered to keep in touch with his chair of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense after being informed that an American consulate was under attack from terrorists.

Dereliction of Duty: Obama Did Nothing To Save American Lives in Benghazi And Lied About It

Excerpt: Nothing. That is what President Barack Obama did on the night of September 11, 2012, as terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and killed four Americans, among them Ambassador Christopher Stevens. President Obama’s inaction was revealed in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday by outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. (As did HC. –Barb.)

Excerpt: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the most popular national political figure in the country, according to a new QuinnipiacUniversitypoll released Friday. Clinton’s approval rating outpaces President Obama — who defeated the former first lady in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary — and other potential rivals for the presidency, should she run again in 2016…. “Hillary Clinton ends her term as Secretary of State and the bruising inquiry into the Benghazi murders as easily the most popular actor on the American political stage today,” said Brown. (No sweat. By 2016, only people with guns—that’s us—will be able to fight their way through the rioters and looters to vote. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: An electronic system used by more than 70 percent of school districts in Texas has recently come under attack by the state’s Senate Education Committee for promoting socialism and criticizing American values. The curriculum management system known as CSCOPE is used by teachers in 875 districts to manage their lesson plans while allowing them to customize material for their own specific classrooms.

Excerpt: A week ago, something went seriously wrong in the underground tunnels beneath the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz (…) eight people were killed, and several others are being treated for irradiation. (...) And another disaster, several days earlier, took place at the heavy-water facility at Arak, whose existencehas been public knowledgesince the mid-nineties. (At last, some good news from the Middle East. This author, Michael Ledeen, seems to have the best sources of all those reporting from that region. As nearly as I can tell by observation, his accuracy rate is above 90%. We may actually have opportunities to exploit here, but that’s for better—and better informed—minds thanmine. Ron P)

Excerpt: Interior secretary nominee Sally Jewell previously served on the board of an environmental group that has filed dozens of lawsuits against the federal government, including against the Department of Interior.